Neowin: Interview with PS3 hacker KaKaRoTo

As you may have read on our previous report, a hacker and homebrew developer known as KaKaRoTo is petitioning Sony by releasing a bunch of homebrew titles for the PS3 (as well as other platforms) for free. He calls this the Humble Homebrew Collection and it’s certainly a unique way to petition a company. So unique, in fact, that we jumped at the opportunity to sit down with him and have a chat.

What exactly makes such a person “tick”? Read on and you might just find out.

Neowin: So KaKaRoTo, tell us a little bit about yourself.

KaKaRoTo: "I'm Youness Alaoui, I'm a Moroccan and I'm living in Canada. I've been working on open source software for the past 10 years, first with aMSN, then professionally for Collabora where I've touched on many open source projects."

Neowin: How did you end up getting involved in the PS3 “Hacking” scene?

KaKaRoTo: "Well, I never planned/wanted to...but I was browsing some forum and I saw a usb dump of the PS Jailbreak dongle. My curiosity got the best of me and I wondered 'what does all that stuff mean?', so I researched the usb protocol specification and then I saw my N900 phone on my desk and thought 'I bet it would be easy to reproduce that with my phone', so I started tinkering. One thing led to another and PSFreedom was born.

It got a lot of attention, more than I imagined (I was just expecting a "cool, the N900 is awesome" kind of response), Android porting started (by other developers) and eventually, I extracted the payload into PL3. I've always been pro-open source and open development, and seeing how the scene is or was, I thought I could help by trying to create a good foundation for future devs. I was thinking of how Dark Alex left the PSP scene and M33 was never heard of again (correct me if I'm wrong). and I thought if only the PSP scene was 100% open, anyone could have picked it up where he left it."